ICANN wants your feedback on registrar reform

ICANN has made a number of proposed amendments to its Registrar Accreditation …

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is making progress on revamping its contract to better protect customers from registrar meltdown and is now asking the public for feedback. The organization launched its public consultation on the Registrar Accreditation Agreement late last week, which solicits feedback via e-mail on a number of possible amendments to the RAA.

The consultation came about after a meeting was held by ICANN in June on how to improve the organization's six-year-old RAA so that it is more effective in today's environment. At that time, ICANN members discussed a number of additions to the RAA, including an escrow program for top-level domains and better tools for enforcing the RAA in the event that third-party registrars fail. In fact, ICANN CEO Paul Twomey said in June that the review was at least partially triggered by the "Registerfly situation."

The "Registerfly situation" is, of course, the drama that went down earlier this year that involved company funds being used to pay for Registerfly then-CEO Kevin Medina's liposuction and adult escorts. Medina was fired for misuse of company funds, but not before he allegedly changed passwords to important accounting information. This ultimately led to the domain registrar allowing 75,000 customer domains to expire, despite repeated requests by its customers to renew or transfer them. Registerfly claimed that it had no way to access the billing department, and all ICANN could do to help the situation was threaten to revoke Registerfly's accreditation. Luckily for ICANN, the threat seemed to have worked. Since then, Medina has been reinstated as the CEO of Registerfly, and the remainder of the company's domains have been handed over to GoDaddy.

"The need for this review is clear," said Twomey in a statement. "The current RAA is more than six years old. We've seen the number of accredited registrars grow to more than 900. And we've seen the incredible difficulties that can be unleashed with the collapse of a Registrar."

Some of the proposed amendments that ICANN is soliciting feedback on include eliminating the practice of obtaining accreditation by purchase, improved enforcement tools, the implementation of data escrow for customers who register using WHOIS privacy services, increased involvement in managing relationships between registrars and domain resellers, and adding certification testing for registrar personnel. It has also provided a transcript online of the discussions that took place during the June workshop. ICANN says that the public forum on the proposed amendments will be open for 30 days, and that feedback can be sent to raa-consulation@icann.org.